years ago, Vimeo had Hollywood dreams. The internet video outfit—owned by Barry Diller’s IAC—had found a niche hosting flicks for artsy filmmakers who didn’t want their works to be tossed into YouTube’s unruly, ad-driven stew. But it was a tiny, money-losing business with annual revenue under $40 million. Vimeo was pinning its hopes on the booming streaming business, betting it could leverage its relationship with creatives to build a subscription service to rival Netflix, Amazon Prime and HBO.
Sud was soon doing the backstroke, transforming Vimeo from a dusty web relic into the showstopper of IAC’s tech portfolio. A one-stop shop to shoot, edit, store and distribute video, Vimeo posted sales of $84 million during the fourth quarter of 2020, a 54% jump from the same period the previous year. Last quarter, net subscribers increased by 300,000, to a total of 1.5 million—a gain of nearly 25%. Annual revenue is on track to top $300 million.
Vimeo should be another star spin-off. In the current frothy cloud software market, Bank of America predicts Vimeo could hit a valuation of $10 billion—about 50% of IAC’s current market cap. Vimeo came aboard IAC in 2006 as a stowaway upon Diller’s purchase of Connected Ventures, the parent of lowbrow comedy site CollegeHumor. The $30 million deal included the comedy studio, its companion merch site BustedTees—and Vimeo, the web player for CollegeHumor’s sketches. “We bought Vimeo almost by accident,” says IAC’s Levin.
She discovered the new customers were using Vimeo to post marketing videos on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their own websites. “There was a huge group of users that no one was serving.” Her team developed tools for businesses to upload logos, insert buy-now buttons and add email capture to their videos. After a year of solid growth, IAC added 50 more people to Sud’s skunkworks.
Great profile. This is why IAC had sucha good run in last 12 months. The CEO had a great presentation at their Capital Market Day. Full credit to IAC and to her.
this is terrible news
昨日涪陵政府及公安上门询问我推特等上访事宜。不知它们何意？为何让我5年上访？为何就是开发地产抢劫我房？不赔。